Cold case reopened in Alburquerque

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sunbury Press has released Dennis Herrick’s murder mystery novel A Brother’s Cold Case. The book had been previously self-published by the author.

About the Book:
When the murder of Andy Cornell’s brother is still unsolved after two and a half years, Andy enters Albuquerque’s hidden worlds of cartel violence, street people, and Pueblo secrets to find justice.

He and Rick were inseparable as boys. So Andy is determined as a newspaper’s police reporter to help the cold-case unit find a breakthrough on the murder of his detective brother.

Andy’s ex-wife, a cold-case detective he once loved, a Pueblo tribal policeman, a college history professor, and a homeless drug informant seem unlikely allies. But they help Andy untangle conflicting details about his brother’s cold case.

To solve Rick’s murder, Andy must prove his own innocence when he becomes the suspect in the homicides of another man and a long-time reporter friend.

What Others Are Saying:
“A Brother’s Cold Case is timely and compelling. This story of a reporter’s search to connect a series of unexplained deaths before he becomes the next victim could have been ripped from newspaper headlines. Complete with a harrowing Sandia Mountain ambush, a life-threatening fire, and a long-surviving Pueblo Indian community with closely held secrets, this mystery will keep you up at night. Dennis Herrick’s new book is a good tale well told.” —Anne Hillerman, author of Spider Woman’s Daughter and Rock With Wings

Excerpt:
Taking another swig caused him to look up. That’s when he realized the man had turned to walk toward him.

“Beat it,” he ordered the man.

The man continued walking toward him. Rick slid off the picnic table bench and rose to his feet. He didn’t want to be sitting if it came to fighting for his booze.

The man stopped on the other side of the table. He wore dark clothes and stared at Rick from under the bill of a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His right arm extended toward Rick.

“What the hell you want?” Rick shook his doubled-up fists as a warning. “I told you to go away, you sonuvabitch. I mean it.”

The man seemed to smile as he stepped into a pool of light. Or was it a sneer? “Hello, Rick.”

Rick blinked. Another former cop? Not familiar. Who is this guy, Rick thought, and how does he know my name?

Rick grabbed his bottle and backed up a step. Now illumination from a park lamp glimmered on the steel pistol in the man’s right hand. A long sound suppressor extended from the barrel. With the table separating them, Rick couldn’t try to move closer and grab the gun as he’d been trained at the police academy years ago. Under the best of circumstances, that was hard to pull off anyway. Still, Rick thought, with the bourbon reassuring his brain of all things possible, maybe he could do it.

He moved sideways around the table to get closer. “Put the gun down,” he said as he took a step toward the man. He almost lost his balance, stepping sideways like that. “Put it away and just leave. We’ll pretend this never happened.”

Rick could see the man’s teeth gleam in the indirect light.

A rush, Rick thought. I’ll throw the bottle at him and rush him.

Rick was a split second from jumping at the man when his world ended.

About the Author:
Dennis Herrick writes mostly about the American Southwest, focusing on the Pueblo natives for his short stories, magazine articles, and his historical novel, Winter of the Metal People.

A Michigan native, he worked for and around newspapers all of his adult life as a daily newspaper reporter, a chief of staff handling press relations for a congressman, a weekly newspaper publisher and editor, a newspaper broker, and finally a full-time lecturer on journalism at the University of New Mexico.

He is a winner of the Tony Hillerman Mystery Contest and the Society of Southwestern Authors Contest.

He and his wife, Beatrice, have been married since 1967. They live along the west bank of the Rio Grande between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.